Greetings friends and welcome to this article on Machine learning libraries for .NET developers. Machine learning is a hot topic right now and for good reason. Personally, I haven't been so excited about a technology since my computer used my 2800 baud modem to dial into a BBS over 17 years ago. The thought that my computer could communicate with another computer was so fascinating to me. That moment was the very moment that would forever change my life. I learned a lot about DOS by writing batch scripts and running other programs that allowed me to visit and then run a BBS system. It eventually lead me to QBasic. I wanted to learn to write BBS door games and QBasic was included as a part of a standard DOS installation back then.

Fast forward 17 years and I'm still in love with computers, programming, and the concept of communication between machines. The magic never disappeared. So when i first learned about the concept of Machine learning, I felt like that 13 year old kid again. The idea that a machine can learn to do things that it has not been programmed to do is now a passion of mine. The concepts of Machine learning have an extreme learning curve, however, I believe that we as humans can do anything that we put our mind to. So I began looking around for tutorials on machine learning. I found many great tutorials and books, however, most of them involved using python. I have nothing against python. As a matter of fact, I find it ironic that I started with BASIC and now in this moment of "rebirth" I'm beginning to use python which looks a lot like BASIC in many ways. The fact of the matter remains, I'm a .NET developer. I've spent the last 9 years in the .NET framework and I love the technology. C# is an awesome programming language and it's hard to imagine life without Visual Studio. What can I say, the IDE has spoiled me.

While I scoured the internet looking for tutorials related to Machine learning resources for .NET developers, I wished that there was a one resource that would assist me in my search for resources to help me achieve my goal.

Well that's what this article is all about. In this article, I will introduce you to some .NET libraries that will assist you in your quest to learn about Machine learning.

NND Neural Network Designer by Bragisoft

The Neural Network Designer project (NND) is a DBMS management system for neural networks that was created by Jan Bogaerts. The designer application is developed using WPF, and is a user interface which allows you to design your neural network, query the network, create and configure chat bots that are capable of asking questions and learning from your feed back. The chat bots can even scrape the internet for information to return in their output as well as to use for learning. The project includes a custom language syntax called NNL (neural network language) that you can use in configuring your machine learning project. The source code is designed so that the libraries can be used in your own custom applications so you don't have to start from scratch with such a complex set of technologies. The project is actually an open source project in which I am a part of. Some of the possibilities offered by this awesome project include predictions, image and pattern recognition, value inspection, memory profiling and much more. Stop by the Bragisoft NND website and download the application to give it a try.

Screen shots of the neural network designer by Bragisoft

A DBMS for neural networks

Mind map rand forrest

The chat bot designer and other tools

Accord.net

Accord.NET is a framework for scientific computing in .NET. The framework builds upon AForge.NET, an also popular framework for image processing, supplying new tools and libraries. Those libraries encompass a wide range of scientific computing applications, such as statistical data processing, machine learning, pattern recognition, including but not limited to, computer vision and computer audition. The framework offers a large number of probability distributions, hypothesis tests, kernel functions and support for most popular performance measurements techniques.

The most impressive parts of this library has got to be the documentation and sample applications that are distributed with the project. This makes the library easy to get started using. I also like the ability to perform operations like Audio processing (beat detection and more), Video processing (easy integration with your web cam, vision capabilities and object recognition). This is an excellent place to start with approaching Machine learning with the .NET framework. Here are a two videos that should whet your appetite.

Hand writing recognition with Accord.NET

Here is an example of head tracking with Accord.NET (super cool)

AIMLBot Program# AILM Chat bot library

AIMLBot (Program#) is a small, fast, standards-compliant yet easily customizable implementation of an AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) based chatter bot in C#. AIMLBot has been tested on both Microsoft's runtime environment and Mono. Put simply, it will allow you to chat (by entering text) with your computer using natural language. The project is located here.

Math.NET

Machine learning algorithms are extremely math heavy. Math.NET is a library that can assist with the math that is required to solve machine learning related problems.

DotNumerics

DotNumerics is a website dedicated to numerical computing for .NET. DotNumerics includes a Numerical Library for .NET. The library is written in pure C# and has more than 100,000 lines of code with the most advanced algorithms for Linear Algebra, Differential Equations and Optimization problems. The Linear Algebra library includes CSLapack, CSBlas and CSEispack, these libraries are the translation from Fortran to C# of LAPACK, BLAS and EISPACK, respectively.

Accessing ‘R’ from C#–Lessons learned

ILNumerics

NuML.net http://numl.net

A nice site about the basics of machine learning in c# by Seth Juarez . NuML.NET is a machine learning library for .NET developers written by Seth Juarez. I've recently tried this library and I'm impressed! Seth has stated publicly that his intention behind the numl.net library is to abstract the scary math away from machine learning to provide tools that are more approachable by software developers and boy did he deliver! I've been working with this library for a little more than an hour and I've written a prediction app in c#. You can find his numl.net library source on github.

Encog Machine Learning Framework

Here is what the official Heaton Research website has to say about Encog:

Encog is an advanced machine learning framework that supports a variety of advanced algorithms, as well as support classes to normalize and process data. Machine learning algorithms such as Support Vector Machines, Artificial Neural Networks, Genetic Programming, Bayesian Networks, Hidden Markov Models and Genetic Algorithms are supported. Most Encog training algoritms are multi-threaded and scale well to multicore hardware. Encog can also make use of a GPU to further speed processing time. A GUI based workbench is also provided to help model and train machine learning algorithms. Encog has been in active development since 2008.

Encog is available for Java, .Net and C/C++.

Jeff Heaton knows a great deal about machine learning algorithms and he's created a wonderful library called Encog. I was able to write a neural network application that solved the classic XOR problem in 20 minutes after installing the library. What really amazes me is that he has an Encog Library for JavaScript which includes live samples on his website of Javascript + encog solving problems like the Traveling Salesman Problem and Conway's game of life, all in a browser! This library can even use your GPU for the heavy lifting if that's your choice. I would highly recommend that you at least check out his site and download the library to look at the examples. You can find the Encog library here.

Conclusion

This concludes my article on Machine learning resources for the .NET developer. If you have any suggestions regarding a project that you know of or you are working on related to Machine learning in .NET, please don't hesitate to leave a comment and I will update the article to mention the project. This article has shown that we as .NET developers have many resources available to us to use to implement Machine learning based solutions. I appreciate your time in reading this article and I hope you found it useful. Please subscribe to my RSS feed. Until next time..

About the author

My name is Buddy James. I'm a Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer from the Nashville, TN area. I'm a Software Engineer, an author, a blogger (http://www.refactorthis.net), a mentor, a thought leader, a technologist, a data scientist, and a husband. I enjoy working with design patterns, data mining, c#, WPF, Silverlight, WinRT, XAML, ASP.NET, python, CouchDB, RavenDB, Hadoop, Android(MonoDroid), iOS (MonoTouch), and Machine Learning. I love technology and I love to develop software, collect data, analyze the data, and learn from the data. When I'm not coding, I'm determined to make a difference in the world by using data and machine learning techniques. (follow me at @budbjames).